


Seventeen

by anenigmaticsmile



Series: Seventeen Years [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 23:05:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11656554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anenigmaticsmile/pseuds/anenigmaticsmile
Summary: Natia Brosca was only seventeen.





	Seventeen

Natia Brosca was seventeen. This was not a fact well-known; if you asked her companions, they would have guessed twenty, twenty-five. Her sister would have said however old she need be. And Natia herself would just give a tired smile and leave. It didn’t matter what anyone said though, because Natia Brosca was only seventeen.

She was only minutes turned seventeen, as near as anyone could reckon, when she donned armor never meant for someone so small as she and entered the Proving Grounds in place of a fighter worth her weight in lyrium and gold. She was hours turned seventeen when she became Champion and was sentenced to death.

(When Duncan asked, on a night dark with hidden stars somewhere north of Redcliffe, she told him she was old enough, and left it at that.)

Death came for her, two weeks paste seventeen in the form of the Joining, under a sky so big she was sure they all were slowly falling into it. Her blood boiled and her tears steamed and the Joining was not soft and not easy and she had never wanted to survive it. So, of course, she did. (That is how the Joining works, after all. It kills only the ones who want to survive.)

Natia Brosca was seventeen when all hell broke loose and she became the de facto head of the Grey Wardens of Fereldan.

She kissed her first girl when she was seventeen, too. It was soft, and kind, pliant, open, and trusting. Everything neither of them had ever had before. To her, it was perfect. (Three months more and it would be sour and broken because Leliana believed in ways Natia never could, never wanted to.)

Four months past seventeen, she found herself in a world she had never experienced, drawn into the Fade by chaos in the Circle Tower. When she escaped (sided with the mages, the oppressed, always, of course), she trembled at the thought of going there every night. Her companions simply laughed at her.

A week later, she had freed an arl’s son from a demon, and a week after that she was kissing an Antivan assassin behind a tree as their clothes dried on a rock, just to see if it was different. (It felt like pressure and want and fear and she hated that she loved it so much more, because it felt like home.)

There were blades and promises and cities she’d never thought to imagine, all scattered in her seventeenth year. Elves in a forest, threatened by werewolves, and she almost laughed at the impossibility of it. Blood mages and stone golems and men who called her traitor for being alive. At least she knew better than to believe them, now.

Six months into her seventeenth year, Natia Brosca settled into her old bones (so young, so young to be so old) and became a wanted thief and thug. Again. (But this time on the streets of Denerim, and she only took jobs she wanted, and that made all the difference.)

Eight months past her seventeenth birthday, Natia Brosca stood shivering in the mountains, feet away from a door she’d never seen but could build from stories if asked. She rocked as well-meaning hands slapped her back, pushed her forward.

Natia Brosca was seventeen and dressed in what passed for Warden blues when a warrior-caste, surface-guard, hulk of a dwarf spat in her branded face. As the saliva froze in her eyelashes she stared him down and talked her way through the door with quiet promises. She pushed her way through crowds and fought old instincts to duck and hide as she passed guards, all while ignoring her friends’ pointed questions.

Natia Brosca was seventeen and newly (barely) literate when she was asked to choose the Kings of Fereldan and Orzammar. She was madly in love with all of her friends when she seventeen, too. Leliana was soft and sweet and so so beautiful. Zevran was a blade she could trust at her back, and that felt like a better home than the one she had left. And Alistair knew things no-one else would understand, charming in a way she had only dreamed of before. (Morrigan had stolen her heart first, but she wasn’t interested, so Natia tried to keep the burning of her heart out of her voice when she spoke.)

Natia Brosca was seventeen when she gave up everything and asked the man she would have married, if he had not been king, to sleep with the girl who owned her heart, because, for some incredible reason, Natia Brosca did not want to die.

Natia Brosca was a few minutes past eighteen, as best as anyone could remember, when she killed the Archdemon and saved the world.

Natia Brosca was eighteen and they called her Hero. Commander. Paragon.

(She still called herself brand.)


End file.
